I said gently, “Gail, come let me introduce you to the band.”

“There’s no need for me to meet the band,” she said. “Just have them play my piece so I can leave.” I looked at Fumio apologetically and gestured toward Gail as if to say, “It’s understandable.” He nodded acknowledgment.

I went up to Kat on the bandstand and told him the composer was here. Kat nodded and told the musicians to turn to the Swing parts on their stands.

I returned to Gail’s side with the score for my original orchestration, from which Jurgen Haffner had extracted the parts that had just been handed out.

There is usually a sense of excitement, anxiety, and (hopefully) elation when an arrangement or composition is performed for the very first time. Until then, the notes have simply been markings on music paper, something imagined in one’s head, perhaps with the assistance of a piano. Now, with the downbeat, the orchestration would come into existence. I felt terrible that Gail would always associate this unique moment in her life with the death of her mother.

Gail took the score from me and placed it underneath her original piano score, which she had brought with her. I said, “Good, that’s the right thing to do. You should never bury your nose in the score on the first run-through. Just listen to it, the way your audience will.”

Whether or not she was paying attention to me, I couldn’t say. She turned to her original score’s back page, where she had written, Dedicated to a World of International Understanding. She took out a fountain pen and inscribed below that and to the memory of Martha Prentice. Peeling away the tape on the score’s back cover, she handed the page upon which she’d inscribed these additional words to Fumio, who saw what was written and accepted it with solemnity. “I understand,” he said quietly. “When the original musicians’ parts are placed in our national archives, I will see that this is included as the dedication page.”

Kat counted off what we call “two bars for nothing,” and the orchestrated Swing was heard by human ears for the very first time.

It’s how you frame it. Or as an agent at MCA once said to me, “It’s all about how you walk in the door.”

I’ve worked vaudeville revues where on opening night a comic owned the audience’s bellies and couldn’t get them to stop howling. The next morning, the big paper in town says he stank. That night, same comic, same stories, same delivery, the guy can’t rent a laugh.